A bunch of celebrities picked books that most changed their lives, so we thought we would do the same. AND YOU SHOULD TOO! Just for funsies.
This isn’t the same as your favorite books or books you once enjoyed or recommended, this is about books that had you not read them, you would not be the person you are today. For example, although AM Homes, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Beverly Cleary and Joan Didion are some of my favorite writers, none of their books changed my life per se, I just thought they were all pretty fucking awesome. Get it, ok let’s go.
Famous people’s favorite books:
Claire Danes, aka Angela Chase
Deception by Philip Roth
Light Years by James Salter
Hills Like White Elephants (from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition) by Ernest Hemingway
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
Diane Keaton
Women Photographers edited by Constance Sullivan
Untitled by Diane Arbus
Keith Carter Photographs: Twenty-Five Years by Keith Carter
Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans by E.J. Bellocq
Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Michael Lesy
Anderson Cooper:
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs
Families: A memoir and a Celebration by Wyatt Cooper
It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir by Gloria Vanderbilt
The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon edited by Kathy Eldon
Books that changed our lives:
Autostraddle CEO Riese:
New and Selected Poems 1974-1994, Stephen Dunn,
Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap by Peggy Orenstein
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Executive Editor Laneia:
Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Managing Editor Sarah:
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
The Indispensable Calvin And Hobbes by Bill Watterson
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
